Cool VL Viewer forum

Hello!
I downloaded the latest Cool VL viewer, and tried it out on Second Life. Most things, including inventory, mesh and stuff work fine, but I have a couple of problems with it (as well as with most V3-based viewers), that are making my experience....uncool.
The friends and groups lists are completely empty.
The display name's not shown.
Upon teleporting, I get disconnected from the grid.

I have tried whatever I've seen, including changing my DNS to OpenDNS and Google DNS, and nothing happens.
I am using Ubuntu 11.10.

Any solution to this?
Thanks in advance.

This is obviously a network problem on your end.

Check that your firewall is not blocking the ports that the viewer and SL are using (especially in the 12000-13999 range).

Also check for the MTU of your network interface (too large a MTU causes packets loss and stalling HTTP requests): a typical max MTU for ADSL links (PPPoE and PPPoA) is 1492 when most OSes use 1500 bytes per default, causing all sorts of troubles.

I've checked. The ports are opened (12000-29999 UDP), and I had set the MTU to 1500, and all I got is losing my connection until I reset it to 1492.

I've seen the empty friend-list a few times (about once a week I guess) over the last couple of months. Sometimes all the names are missing, sometimes just some. After a few minutes (5-20) they finally appear.

My internet connection is perfectly fine BTW. I never see ANY packet losses in Help/About.

I'm guessing that the problem with the friend-list is somewhere on SL's end.

I have tried other viewers as well, including Phoenix and Singularity which are mesh enabled and they work just fine. The display names don't show at times but that is easily fixed by disabling and re-enabling them. I've tried FS on Wine too, so it seems to be a problem on Unix-based systems (I've heard Mac seems to have it too...)
But the empty friend/group lists as well as the disconnecting-upon-teleport are present in every V3-based viewer I've tried including Firestorm, and that bug seems to have been 'backported' into Cool VL as well.

There is no such bug: I suggest you re-check your network.
The difference between v1 viewers and v3 viewers (including the Cool VL Viewer and Singularity which share about 75% of v2/3 viewers code) is simply that names are fetched via HTTP instead of old UDP messages when display names are supported by the grid.
If you can't see the display names and get disconnected too often during TPs (TPs sometimes fail because of lag, but this should not happen often: at most once a day, during peak concurrency time), it's because your system somehow fails to complete the corresponding HTTP requests.

Also, running the viewers under Wine is highly discouraged and would most often result in serious problems: better running them under VirtualBox (v4.0, because v4.1's OpenGL got issues, especially with NVIDIA graphics cards).

FYI, I've been running the viewer almost exclusively under Linux for the past 6 years and never had such issues as the ones you describe.

Well then, is there something I could try to fix it? Setting the max MTU to 1500 did not work as it would cause my connection not to work anymore on any of my computers. And as I mentioned, even under Wine the V3-based viewers and Cool VL work although they are indeed laggy and screw my screen upon closing them (unless I kill the processes), so I guess if it were the system not even those would work. Also I'm not too fond of running 3d applications on virtual machines.

Of course ! I told you to check the MTU was *small* enough and recommended 1492 for an ADSL connection... Please, *read* what I write...
Look, if the official viewer doesn't work on your system as far as the network is concerned, then it's *normal* that other viewers (including the Cool VL Viewer) doesn't work either. You'll have to fix your system and I can't help you to do this (I'm supporting the Cool VL Viewer, not your OS, computer or whatnot). I suggest you ask for help to LL by opening a ticket and explaining viewer 3 doesn't work for you.

This said, LL pretty much broke the grid today (it's been broken for the past 8 hours) due to a maintenance that went wrong (see the grid status blog). I can see many sims I can't TP to neither log into while they are online. It's been ages LL didn't break the grid so badly... makes me feel like back in 2006 with day-long down times...

Well, I have just done that. Thanks anyway.